NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Curled up with Robert Bringhurst’s gorgeous, illuminating The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada last night. And this:

A book is usually something we can carry in one hand, yet if it is a real book it is also larger than we are: a city or forest of words that can feed us and swallow us up and transform us. A book is not a catalogue or list; it has to make more sense than that. It is not a stack of corwood but a tree: a branching, leafing, flowering structure, unforlding in the mind, where it can find the space it needs.

Reminds me somewhat of Flannery O’Connor’s contention that good short stories are not short.

And this on why he wrote the book:

"History of the Book in Canada] troubles me in two respects: First, it is sytematically devoid of any intellectual or literary senseof what might really constitute a book or why books matter to the human species. Second, despite its insistence otath all books have material form, it exhibits no more interest in the visual and sculptural aspects of Canadian books than in their intellectual and literary role…I concentrate here on things the History of the Book in Canada glances over or leaves out: Canada’s wealth of Aboriginal traditions, in which the books are still primarily oral; the visual and sculptural coming-of-age of the Candian printed book; and the explosion of books produced in the last few decades."

Books to humans "as basic as nests to birds":

Books exist because we want and need them. Many people want them nearly asa much as they want children, and for closely related reasons. Humans, like all mammals, bequeath what they can to their offspring in two forms: natural and cultural, or genetic and nongenetic. Neither is suffient on its own. Books, whether oral or written, are among the most powerful means we have for transmitting nongenetic heredity. Idolizing them brings with it certain problems. Societies that worship particular books have a worrisome record of aggravated self-righteousness. But worshipping a book is incompatiblel with genuinely reading it. And books, for all their failings – and their writers’ and readers’ failings too – seem to be crucial to human culture. Books – not writing or printing, but books in the deeper sense – may be part of our basic identiy as a species. As basic as nests to birds."

Filled with hundreds of outstanding examples of Canadian book design, Bringhurst’s coffee table volume includes at the end a listing of Alcuin Society Design Award winners. Here are the top ten winningest designers:

Tim Inkster 43

Gordon Robertson 35

Peter Cocking 28

George Vaitkunas 21

Jessica Sullivan 16

Michael Solomon 15

Alan Brownoff 13

Zab Design (E.A. Hobart) 12

Scott Richardson 11 (Listen to our conversation on Book Design here)

Andrew Steeves 11

Reading and admiring this book prompts me to want to start searching for some of the gems on display…George Murray has spoken highly to me of Canadian poet Richard Outram. Tim Inkster designed some of his books for Porcupine’s Quill. Man in Love for example. Turns out I have several Inkster books, including one that Bringhurst devotes a double page spread to: Ottawa author Mark Frukin’s Atmosphere Apollinaire. Other designers of note at work in the 1960s include Takao Tanabe, Robert Reid, and Frank Newfeld. And then of course there’s Bringhurst himself. Going after the works of any one of these masters would result in a lovely collection.

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